Authors
Jeremy Harris
Publication date
2013/12/17
Description
In the late 50’s and early 60’s, experimentalists found that in small slices of cortical tissue, cells exhibit similar behavior to identical stimuli (Mountcastle, 1957; Wiesel and Hubel, 1965). Since pattern formation is a population level phenomenon, it seems intractable to begin with individual neural dynamics with each obeying a Poisson statistics. To this end, Amari in 1977 along with Wilson and Cowan in 1972 were some of the earliest to suggest modeling cortical neural tissue as neural fields (Amari, 1977; Wilson and Cowan, 1972). This type of aggregate approach may be more suitable for studying learning, memory, and pattern recognition, as the cumulative information may be more pertinent to these types of large-scale stimulus input.